That’s the bad advice lots of people gave me when I moved to Nashville.

I understand that heroes can disappoint. When I was a kid, I met the winningest left-handed pitcher in major league baseball history, Warren Spahn, and he was a pluperfect (though decidedly imperfect) jerk. And I understand that choosing your heroes by how well they threw a curveball is a silly endeavor, at best, but try to tell that to a kid.

Well, it’s actually a little easier to explain after the kid meets Warren Spahn. But that option is now unavailable, short of time travel or séance.

Anyway, let’s put sports aside. Big-time sports require a competitive zeal that can cross over into jealousy and aggression and things like that. Plus, many athletes are nice folks. I met Cy Young Award-winning knuckleballer R.A. Dickey in the airport the other day, and he couldn’t have been more affable and pleasant — that’s just to say that this column tends to be (is SUPPOSED to be, my editors assure) about music, not sports. And when people told me not to meet my heroes, they meant to imply that I’d be let down by the song-poets whose words and music I admired.

Sometimes, what we like to call surreal experiences are merely the odd juxtaposition of ordinary events.

And sometimes that juxtaposition brings two extraordinary folks together, as in what happened at a taping of “The Marty Stuart Show” on Monday night.
Merle Haggard rolled into town on his Super Chief bus for Stuart’s twangtastic show which airs on RFD-TV.

While Stuart is an equal opportunity distributor of gracious good cheer, he considers Haggard one of the true pillars of all that is right and good in country music, so the air was charged with anticipation.

We all know that Stuart has a healthy appreciation for stage craft, especially for those outfits with enough reflective wattage to light half the Superdome. Even his band, the Fabulous Superlatives, wear matching numbers, so studded with sequins that they wink and smile when they catch the light.

Not the Hag. He stands there in a black suit, a rumpled brown fedora, and a T-shirt with a logo for some unrecognizable New York athletic venue.

And that juxtaposition just plain works, because of the love and respect those men have for each other. One man who cares deeply about image, down to his trademark mane, standing next to another who couldn’t give a flying flip.

And neither disapointed. Backed by Stuart and the Superlatives, along with Hag’s wife, Theresa, and son Bennie, “the poet of the common man” reminded every lucky soul in that studio audience why his music matters today as much as when it resonated through the AM airwaves 40 years ago.

During the taping, Haggard make a head-scratching joke about Waffle House. Instead of saying that you need to drop the “W” to describe the place, he said you drop the “H.” The moment went quickly by.

Later, when the show was over, you couldn’t help but notice a tall yellow sign across the street beckoning motorists on Dickerson Pike. It spelled Waffle on top, but the “H” below was burned out. And somewhere on the Super Chief, a keen observer who makes the mundane superlative, must have been chuckling to himself.

Click here for a photo gallery of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill opening their Soul2Soul run at the Venetian Theatre in Las Vegas this weekend. (Photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

LAS VEGAS - Cruise through the casino at The Venetian, the ornate Italian-themed Las Vegas resort, and you’ll find the cowboy hat count on the uptick this weekend.

Some cowboys had come for the roping at the annual Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, which happens in Sin City this week. But others had come for the music.

Larry Smith, for example, might have been sporting a Western-style shirt with Wrangler and Jack Daniels patches, but he flew to Vegas with his wife Lisa solely to see Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s show Soul2Soul, which opened on Friday.

“We just like country music,” Lisa Smith said of making the trip from Beaumont, Calif.

It seemed many of the 1,800 people in the Venetian Theatre for the star couple’s second night of their 10-weekend stand like country music, too, as Hill and McGraw delivered a high-energy but often intimate show that prompted multiple standing ovations, overhead clapping and arms stretched to the theater’s domed ceiling.

“I came to this town for one reason,” Brooks said on the red carpet just inside the hall’s doors. “That was to get George Strait to record ‘Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).’ Tonight, he’s singing it.”

“I’m going to try to set a record drinking this much moonshine in a three-minute song,” Dunn joked, holding a mason jar of clear liquid, before he launched into a version of George Jones’ “White Lightning,” the first song on which Robbins professionally played.

Dale Dodson, Cochran’s close friend and the co-producer (with Buddy Cannon) of Jamey Johnson’s gorgeous new Cochran tribute album, says, “Nobody put himself through more hell than Hank: He’d get in the lowest of lows, put himself in a deep state of depression, and pour that out in eight lines of a song.”

And Johnson says, “Hank was not a sorrowful person. Hank was a happy man.”

They’re probably all correct. That’s the thing. Throughout most of his

74 years, Cochran was whatever he needed to be in order to write whatever he needed to write.

Ask around town this week, as the International Bluegrass Music Association gathers in Nashville for its annual conference and awards show, and you’ll find plenty of bluegrass banjo pickers happy to claim him as part of the family.

But while Wiseman is a much-celebrated bluegrass lynchpin — and certainly a part of the family — he’s not a bluegrass artist. He has spent a musical lifetime defying the genre’s implied limitations — instrumentation, song selection, harmony-heavy choruses and the like — and embracing every opportunity to wrap his spirited, twangless tenor around songs of many stripes.

The 2012 BMI Country Awards will hardly be Hall’s first — the singer has won a total of 31 BMI Awards and met his wife, Dixie, at the BMI Country Awards in 1965. The couple has been married for 44 years.

Jamey Johnson and a crew of country legends and music stars pay tribute to late songwriting great Hank Cochran with his new album "Livin' For a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran," which is set to hit stores on October 16.

"If I had to dream up somebody like Hank to influence songwriters, I couldn't have done a better job," Johnson said in a release. "That's what he was-- not just for me, but for Willie and for a lot of people--just a helpful friend. If he knew you needed help with something, he could help you. He was there. And that's what I want to be for the people in my life, same as Hank. He influenced me, not only as an artist and songwriter, but also as a person."